Tau neutrino flux in IceCube data

In summary, scientists have found something that doesn't quite fit with current theory - it's possible that this is something that has been happening for a long time, but we just haven't had the technology to see it.
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  • #2
Don't panic! This is likely stuff that's been going on forever - we just haven't had the tools to even see it until now.

As for "informing the public", that's something scientists try to do all the time. The more people are enthused about science, the more they're willing to fund it.

Forgive me if I'm wrong, but between this and your other thread about a galaxy in the early universe, I think you're reading a "prepare for the end" vibe into this that isn't there.
 
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  • #3
If that’s you take on it please explain what the article and paper are saying?

there is a flux of neutrinos that just hit Earth that have no reason to?
 
  • #4
Neutrinos have been passing through the Earth all the time. What is new is improved methods of detection.
 
  • #5
I'm afraid the details of the article are beyond me. Others (@mfb?) may be able to comment. The high level summary, though, is "we've spotted something that we think doesn't fit well with current theory - anybody got any ideas?" The thing is, we've literally only just built detectors that can spot this kind of thing. And immediately they spot things. The simplest explanation is that the events have been going on forever - we just couldn't see them before. It's like opening your eyes and seeing it's light outside. You don't infer that the Sun came up that second and start wondering how it jumped twenty degrees above the horizon. You infer that it's been light for a while - you just didn't see anything until you opened your eyes.

Generally, experiment disagreeing with theory leads to new theory. And we've known for decades that quantum field theory and general relativity don't fit together well. High energy particles doing something unexpected is possibly a clue to where our maths is wrong. Or it could be that the detector isn't quite as noise-free as they think.
 
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  • #6
I still do not understand what is going on, this is the first time that these have been found in this massive flux and they do not know why. The detectors have been there for over 10 years and nothing like this has ever happened?

according to the findings something had hit us from space that we cannot explain or even see what it came from.
 
  • #7
As far as I understand it they find no signal in IceCube data (which has been there a while) but they do find signals in ANITA data (which has had a recent detector upgrade). That combination puts pretty severe constraints (that I don't understand) on the possible sources - which is the weird thing. But there are two, possibly three, ANITA events and they're spread over at least a couple of years. It's not that they saw nothing, then suddenly they saw three events in a few days - they're coming in every year or two.

And yes, something we don't understand hit Earth. But on the evidence, it's quite plausible that it's happened every year or two (and probably a lot more, since the detectors are nowhere near 100% efficient) for the four billion years Earth's been around. If it were dangerous, you and I would never have been born.

Fiction is fond of having a new detector be the herald of some new catastrophe - it's a cheap way to generate conflict between our heroes and authority figures. The real world doesn't work that way. Go back and read what I wrote about opening your eyes and seeing the Sun - we just opened our eyes further.

And with that, I note that I haven't seen the Sun in some hours myself. Signing off for now.
 
  • #8
I am confused I am sorry
what is meant by over a couple of years I did not get that from the articles.

the articles claim that its a not understandable things that has hit Earth and we have no idea how bad it is?
 
  • #9
Timboo said:
its a not understandable things that has hit Earth and we have no idea how bad it is?
But that doesn't mean it has to be bad. As has been pointed out already, if we have only recently been able to measure something then that doesn't imply it is a new phenomenon. Moreover, why should a new phenomenon be necessarily bad? We have no idea how bad or how less bad. There are plenty of obviously bad things to worry about- if you really want to worry. Worry about the climate and about the Coronavirus - or obesity or terrorism or tax or getting old. Arrrrgh, I can't stand it. :cool:
 
  • #10
Anything that will destroy the universe or us is bad so not sure what you are stating it is not especially in our lifetime

am in the only one understanding this in the articles
 
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  • #11
Timboo said:
am in the only one understanding this in the articles

I think you're the only one misunderstanding them.
 
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  • #12
Please explain so I do understand
 
  • #13
Over the course of its data-taking, ANITA has been seeing three events that look like neutrinos at very high energy. One was in 2006, the year ANITA started taking data, one in 2014, and one in 2015. ANITA doesn't take data continuously, it makes separate flights over the Antarctic summer. There is nothing sudden about these events.

The first events triggered interest in the particle physics community when it happened, and the 2014 event made this much more interesting. They do not have to come from high energy neutrinos, there is always a chance that events are mis-classified as no experiment is perfect. It's not expected that three events are mis-classified but we can't rule it out either.

We don't know what makes neutrinos achieve such a high energy, but we have been measuring high energy neutrinos for as long as we have detectors to do so. IceCube in particular with its giant size can measure many of them. They are interesting for particle physicists but they rarely make big headlines.

What makes the ANITA events more interesting: At these energies Earth absorbs almost all neutrinos going through it. The 2015 event came from above the horizon - its energy seems to be is really high, but it came from above the horizon, so no problem from that side. The 2006 and the 2014 events come from below the horizon - they would have to travel through Earth, and they can't do that according to our current theories. Something must be wrong, and some of the possible options are exciting:
  • The events were not caused by neutrinos, but came from noise in the detector or whatever - the most boring option.
  • The events were caused by neutrinos but the estimate of the direction was wrong. That still gives us the task to find the origin of them and to figure out how they reach this energy.
  • The events were caused by neutrinos that did travel through Earth and we underestimate that probability - this would be a very remarkable discovery, changing our knowledge of neutrinos in many ways.
  • The events were caused by some other particles that travel through Earth - no known particle can do it, so this would be something fundamentally new. Even more exciting.
How can we figure out which one is correct? We try to measure similar events with other detectors. If they can also measure neutrinos at high energy traveling through Earth then we can rule out measurement problems of ANITA. IceCube did so, and didn't find similar events, in an analysis they made public a month ago. There are scenarios where ANITA would see something but IceCube can't find it, but they are much more exotic. This makes the first two options more likely - the more boring options.

All this has zero impact on our lives. It's studied to learn more about the universe only.
 
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  • #14
So why warn the public as they said and there paper that was submitted did not look like something that was nothing?

also the last event you mentioned was 2015 what about the latest event that sparked all these articles.
 
  • #15
Nobody is "warning" the public, and as far as I can tell, the only person suggesting this is dangerous is you.
 
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  • #17
What, this bit?
"The message we want to convey to the public is that a Standard Model astrophysical explanation does not work no matter how you slice it," Barbano said.
How in the seven worlds are you reading any amount of doom and gloom from such an innocuous statement?
 
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  • #18
Also worthy of note - table 1 in the paper says these incredibly high energy particles carry around 10 EeV (exa electron volts) of energy. Converting into SI units that's about 1 J. You expend ten times that lifting a bag of pasta into your cupboard. That's a huge amount of energy for a single particle to have, but it's no threat to us. It does imply something pretty powerful generating it, but if it's so far away that the only thing we are seeing is the occasional neutrino it's nothing to worry about either.
 
  • #19
Timboo said:
This article states they felt the need to I form the public

https://www.google.ca/amp/s/www.space.com/amp/antarctic-neutrino-mystery-deepens.html
Scientists are always Informing the Public but that doesn't always mean they are Warning the Public. They informed us about the images of that black hole, last year. Were they warning us about anything? You could say that they inform the public (the customer) in order to justify the vast amounts of public money spent on research.

Something you may not have considered is the actual effect of a single Neutrino as it go through the Earth. Imagine, worst case, that it produced an atom of one of the most toxic or radioactive elects you could think of. What possible effect could that have on the Human Race (particularly if the event occurred miles below the Earth's surface)?

Really: don't worry.
 
  • #20
The message we want to convey to the public
Read: "Here is a single-sentence summary of years of work of our team, simple enough to be understandable by laypeople."
is that a Standard Model astrophysical explanation does not work no matter how you slice it
To be more specific: If the events are caused by neutrinos then we don't understand how they could arrive there. If they are not caused by neutrinos we don't know what caused them.
 
  • #21
That you all for response, but I still do not understand how the current detected event is part of it
 
  • #22
The message we want to convey to the public
mfb said:
Read: "Here is a single-sentence summary of years of work of our team, simple enough to be understandable by laypeople."
The phrasing is slightly clumsy - it does come across as rather formal and stilted, which (I guess) is what has set the OP's social antenna quivering. However, the scientist quoted is called Anastasia Barbano and is at the University of Geneva. I'm guessing she's either Italian or Italian speaking Swiss. I don't speak Italian but I do speak Spanish, and this kind of phrasing looks to me like somebody whose English works by more or less transliterating her native Latin-derived language. I can't criticize (you should hear my Spanish...) but I'd have phrased it a lot more casually - and I suspect an Italian speaker would read her perfectly casually too.
Timboo said:
That you all for response, but I still do not understand how the current detected event is part of it
I would imagine that the third detection bumped "investigate this" far up their priority list. Either they've got a broken detector or they've discovered a new phenomenon (be it a particle or source). If the former, they want to fix the machine and warning other scientists of potential oddities in the data is polite and important. If the latter, they want to publish before some yahoo scoops them.

Side note: the cosmic microwave background was discovered by accident by a couple of Marconi engineers who didn't know Friedmann from a hole in the ground. They just couldn't figure out why there was this noise in their antenna that they couldn't get rid of (even after shooting all the pigeons nesting in their machinery). There are some hilariously sniffy papers from serious astrophysicists who'd been trying to scrape together funding to look for something these engineers found by accident. Everyone wants their name on the ground breaking paper, not one saying "we saw this first but didn't tell anyone".
 
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  • #23
Ibix said:
Side note: the cosmic microwave background was discovered by accident by a couple of Marconi engineers who didn't know Friedmann from a hole in the ground. They just couldn't figure out why there was this noise in their antenna that they couldn't get rid of (even after shooting all the pigeons nesting in their machinery).
I think this is a good comparison. Neutrino astronomy is a brand new branch of physics. The hope is to look further into BB than we can do today with photons. It also means that new data are gathered, old are revised, and the calibration and handling of detectors has to be learnt. Furthermore we are far from being able to explain or even know all phenomena the universe provides. E.g. there are pulsars which rotate in the kHz range. Imagine what more we don't know, yet. There are far too many unknowns for final conclusions, in my opinion.
 
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  • #24
So basically whatever this may be is no danger to us in any way ?
 
  • #26
Even something we may not see coming that is causing this
 
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  • #27
Timboo said:
Even something we may not see coming that is causing this
If you want to be frightened, then it is sufficient to choose one of the usual suspects, as there are:
  • an asteroid impact
  • a gamma ray burst
  • a nuclear war
  • explosion of a supervolcano like Yellowstone or the Phlegraean Fields
  • Cumbre Vieja on La Palma
  • climate change
  • reborn virus from former permafrost soil
  • supernova nearby
  • PMO
and probably a lot more. So you won't need neutrinos which rarely interact with anything to paint your "The end is near!" poster.
 
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  • #28
So it is one of those causing it
 
  • #29
Timboo said:
So it is one of those causing it
No. Neutrinos are definitely no threat. They simply don't do anything.
 
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  • #30
You previous post specified different options
 
  • #31
Timboo said:
So basically whatever this may be is no danger to us in any way ?
You've taken "we saw something we don't understand" and added "that started coincidentally around the time we developed the kit to spot it, and it's dangerous". All our experience says that anything cosmological that's going on has been going on for millions of years, somewhere or other. If it were going to kill us, we wouldn't be here chatting about it.
 
  • #32
It could be something following no?
 
  • #33
Timboo said:
You previous post specified different options
What are you after? Are there natural or human made threats to us? Yes. Is it likely to happen soon? No. Neutrinos are not on the list.
 
  • #34
fresh_42 said:
What are you after? Are there natural or human made threats to us? Yes. Is it likely to happen soon? No. Neutrinos are not on the list.
You just lost me with happening soon?
 
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  • #35
Timboo said:
That you all for response, but I still do not understand how the current detected event is part of it
There is no such thing. The IceCube publication was describing how they saw no events.
 
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<h2>1. What is a tau neutrino?</h2><p>A tau neutrino is a type of elementary particle that is part of the family of neutrinos. It is a neutral particle with a very small mass and no electric charge. It is one of the three known types of neutrinos, along with the electron neutrino and the muon neutrino.</p><h2>2. What is the IceCube data?</h2><p>The IceCube data is a collection of measurements and observations of neutrinos that have been detected by the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, which is located at the South Pole. This observatory is made up of a cubic kilometer of ice that is used to detect high-energy neutrinos from outer space.</p><h2>3. How is the tau neutrino flux measured in IceCube data?</h2><p>The tau neutrino flux in IceCube data is measured by looking at the interactions of tau neutrinos with the ice in the observatory. When a tau neutrino interacts with an atom in the ice, it produces a tau lepton which can then be detected by the observatory's sensors. By analyzing the frequency and intensity of these interactions, scientists can determine the flux of tau neutrinos in the data.</p><h2>4. What is the significance of studying the tau neutrino flux in IceCube data?</h2><p>Studying the tau neutrino flux in IceCube data can provide valuable insights into the origins and behavior of high-energy neutrinos from outer space. This can help scientists understand the processes that produce these neutrinos and the properties of the particles they interact with. It can also provide information about the composition and evolution of the universe.</p><h2>5. What are some potential applications of the tau neutrino flux data from IceCube?</h2><p>The tau neutrino flux data from IceCube can have several potential applications. It can be used to study astrophysical phenomena, such as supernovae and black holes, that produce high-energy neutrinos. It can also be used to search for dark matter particles, which are thought to interact with neutrinos. Additionally, it can be used to test theories and models of particle physics and cosmology.</p>

1. What is a tau neutrino?

A tau neutrino is a type of elementary particle that is part of the family of neutrinos. It is a neutral particle with a very small mass and no electric charge. It is one of the three known types of neutrinos, along with the electron neutrino and the muon neutrino.

2. What is the IceCube data?

The IceCube data is a collection of measurements and observations of neutrinos that have been detected by the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, which is located at the South Pole. This observatory is made up of a cubic kilometer of ice that is used to detect high-energy neutrinos from outer space.

3. How is the tau neutrino flux measured in IceCube data?

The tau neutrino flux in IceCube data is measured by looking at the interactions of tau neutrinos with the ice in the observatory. When a tau neutrino interacts with an atom in the ice, it produces a tau lepton which can then be detected by the observatory's sensors. By analyzing the frequency and intensity of these interactions, scientists can determine the flux of tau neutrinos in the data.

4. What is the significance of studying the tau neutrino flux in IceCube data?

Studying the tau neutrino flux in IceCube data can provide valuable insights into the origins and behavior of high-energy neutrinos from outer space. This can help scientists understand the processes that produce these neutrinos and the properties of the particles they interact with. It can also provide information about the composition and evolution of the universe.

5. What are some potential applications of the tau neutrino flux data from IceCube?

The tau neutrino flux data from IceCube can have several potential applications. It can be used to study astrophysical phenomena, such as supernovae and black holes, that produce high-energy neutrinos. It can also be used to search for dark matter particles, which are thought to interact with neutrinos. Additionally, it can be used to test theories and models of particle physics and cosmology.

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